Reaching Major Milestones with 1,000-Members, Content Credentials in Adobe Firefly and Much More 

Written By Andy Parsons

By Andy Parsons, Senior Director, Content Authenticity Initiative 

This past month, the Content Authenticity Initiative achieved three major milestones representing the fast pace of progress toward our critical goal of making content more transparent and trustworthy, everywhere.  

First, we are thrilled to announce that the CAI has crossed the 1,000-member mark! After launching the CAI just over 3 years ago, we are incredibly proud to have grown a global coalition of leading tech and media companies, camera manufacturers, news publishers, creative professionals, researchers, NGOs and many more – all contributing their expertise, code, and energy to advance this mission.  

This comes at a critical time as content becomes easier to manipulate and determining what’s authentic is challenging, to say the least. Specifically, generative AI has broken through as a creative technology for content inspiration and creation that is transforming the world. While AI has unprecedented potential to amplify human creativity, it also shines a light on the urgent need to restore trust online. 3 years ago, the CAI team and partners anticipated a future of powerful AI tools and eroding trust. And through hard work and deep collaboration, we are proud to see the day-by-day heightened call for authenticity at this key turning point in human history. Above all, we’re resolute in finding ways to deploy the techniques, tools, and standards that we have built together, so that everyone can benefit from them. 

Leveraging Content Credentials in Firefly Beta 

At Adobe Summit last month, Adobe’s new generative AI model, Firefly, was announced, and along with it our commitment to leveraging CAI’s Content Credentials to bring transparency to generative AI outputs. Every asset produced with Firefly has embedded a Content Credential indicating the model used and its version. This is significant—it not only builds on our mission to ensure tools like Firefly are used responsibly, but also gives viewers of this content important context to understand what they’re seeing or hearing, enabling them to make trust decisions when necessary.  

In addition, to ensure creators have more control over their work, they can use CAI provenance technology and attach “Do Not Train” credentials that travel with their content wherever it goes. With industry adoption, this will prevent AI developers from training on content with “Do Not Train” credentials. With this universal standard now published in the latest C2PA technical specification, we believe this will be adopted quickly across industry. 

Creative storyteller Hallease Narvaez showcased our Content Credentials features in the Firefly Beta at Summit, exhibiting an incredible display of how the CAI technology works with generative AI content – be sure to check out her video here.  

C2PA Releases Key Updates to the Technical Specification  

As the CAI and the non-profit standards development organization, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), continue to engage in deeply complimentary threads of work—the C2PA honing the blueprint for the future of digital provenance while the CAI builds a massive community to put the standard to work—we are also excited about the just-released version 1.3 of its technical specification that includes expanded support for an array of media types, as well as generative AI transparency capabilities. 

This is perhaps the largest update to the spec since its initial publication in 2021. Among the highlights are: 

  • Support for additional file types, including WAV for pro audio and WebP for image delivery. 

  • Extended metadata for media creation and modifications so AI-generated ingredients can be clearly captured and displayed. 

  • “Regions of interest” for explaining which parts of media were impacted by various actions, when appropriate.  

  • Universal support for generative AI transparency and creators’ “do not train” intent. 

I am so inspired and humbled by the recent accomplishments of the CAI ecosystem. I’m also reminded how much more work we all have ahead of us, to ensure digital provenance is available to journalists, creators, and consumers wherever and whenever they need tools for authentic storytelling.  

As always, if interested in our work, you can join our expansive and ever-growing community here.  

Join us and get started with these resources 

Andy Parsons
Previous

Community event: authentic storytelling for the era of generative AI
Next

Community event: get started with digital provenance tools